1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a storage operational system and a method of providing a storage rental service and especially, relates to the storage operational system, which allows storage service providers to efficiently operate the system to meet the customers' requests and the method of providing the storage rental service, which allow the storage service providers to provide appropriate storage rental services matching for their charges to users for improving users' satisfaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
In computer systems being operated and administered by enterprises, as the amount of data stored in the storage device (hereafter, simply referred to as a storage) has increased, administration works has became complicated with higher costs. Under such a situation, as one of measures to solve involved problems, out of various computing-related jobs in the enterprises, a storage administration job may be consigned to storage service providers (hereafter, simply referred to as SSP), who are surrogate companies.
Usually, the SSP has one or more storages and splits them into partitioned areas to rent to multiple users. The user pays a rental fee for his/her own storage area assigned and the SSP provides to him/her an administrative service for the assigned storage area. This administrative system allows the user, who stores his/her data in the rented storage area, to save the cost for data management (see the article “SSPs Supporting the Service Industry”, Nikkei System Provider, Mar. 16, 2001).
The above-mentioned storage administrative service provided by the SSP may create a promising business market because it has an advantage in that the user can use a higher reliable storage for a reasonable cost without having a large-scale storage system.
The problem to be solved by the SSP lies in that he/her must earn profits as large as possible from the service business to achieve a high return on investment while making full use of its own storage to give the user satisfaction.
However, under the present situation, such a requirement is difficult to be satisfied that the SSP uses its storage efficiently while meeting the user's needs.
For example, some cash-rich users may want to have a large-capacity, high performance storage area assigned even if they pay a higher cost while others may want to make a service contract for a low cost even if a small capacity, low-performance storage area is assigned.
Taking these users' needs into account, the SSP should present different service conditions and fees specific to individual users. In the present circumstances, however, it is sometimes impossible that the service conditions and fees, which satisfy the users' needs, are indicated. In this case, the user, to whom no service is offered, is thrown into despair and the SSP may throw away an opportunity for business despite the existence of the user, who wants to use the storage service.
On the other hand, it is expected that practically, in many cases, the storage can be used with no problem even if all the users' needs are not always satisfies.
In addition, it should be considered that the user's needs are always volatile and not fixed. For example, some users required a large capacity of storage area at one time and a less capacity of storage area at present. In this case, a decrease in cost is the users' benefit while it is the SSP's benefit to make a service contract with others, who want to use those storage areas. In such a situation, it is difficult for the SSP to assign the storage areas to the users properly under the conditions of the conventional storage service.
Even if the SSP accepts the users' needs and provides the service satisfying them, not only efficient use of the system cannot be achieved but also the users are forced to spend unfruitful time and effort. For example, if the storage areas not used are provided for lower prices, the users stand to gain in cost saving while the SSP may use the storage system effectively.
An object of the present invention, which is intended to solve the problems mentioned above, is to provide the storage operational system and the method of providing the storage rental service, which satisfy a wide variety of users' needs to improve the users' satisfaction and allows the SSP to operate its own storage system efficiently while coping with any change in use for storage.